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Self-Care Habits That Give Students Our Best Self

Cruz selfcarehabits

The following is an adapted excerpt from M. Colleen Cruz's Risk. Fail. Rise. 

We all know self-care is important for many reasons. For example, self-care helps us to ensure we are at our most optimal health without health care interventions, according to the World Health Organization. If health for health’s sake isn’t enough, studies tell us that health and happiness are connected. The happier you are, the better your heart rate and blood pressure and less of the stress hormone cortisol you have in your body (which can lead to diabetes and hypertension) (Steptoe, Wardle, and Marmot 2005). Even in professions outside of teaching, studies have shown the power of self-care. In a journal for social workers, Social Work Today, Karen Fliny Stipp and Kyle Miller (2016) write, “Self-care is not a luxury ancillary to our professional assignments but a professional activity that makes being present and empathic a possibility. Ongoing self-care boosts our capacity to build healing relationships time and again with clients who live in trauma’s wake.” Many of us can read that quote and replace the term clients with students and their families and know that when we are well taken care of, we are able to better respond to students who have experienced or are currently experiencing trauma.

But few, if any of us, have spent time calculating the cost in terms of mistakes. Both being more likely to make bad ones and less likely to have the ability to reap the rewards from good ones.

To prevent mistakes, there are some things we just need to acknowledge from the start.

  1. Tired and hungry people make more mistakes.
  2. Multitasking people make more mistakes.
  3. Unregulated emotions can lead to mistakes.
  4. Making assumptions (that something is a fact, our judgment of a person or a situation) leads to more mistakes.

There are of course things missing from this list. Often more than one thing is in play. But chances are, if you think of the last mistake you made, you can recall that at least one thing on the list was present. I am going to suggest you look at your current teaching life and realities. Sleeping enough, getting enough nutritious food, pruning our to-do lists so that we feel less pressure to multitask, proactively exploring and tending to our myriad emotions, and moving through the world with the knowledge that what we think we know is true could very well not be will go a long way toward preventing the most common mistakes.

To say this more strongly, despite the repeated proclamation of how teachers have the best job in the world and staunch belief that we get paid back 100-fold in knowing we’ve helped others, teachers need to take care of ourselves first and foremost. When considering the martyr teacher narrative, the consequences are often left out. Mr. Thackeray gave up his dream job of being an engineer. Miss Honey gave up her inheritance. So seriously, and I say this as much for myself as for anyone reading this book, if you incorporate nothing else, please consider this—take care of yourself. When you do, you will be doing right by not only yourself and those closest to you but also, importantly, your students.

Are You Meeting Your Own Basic Needs?

To minimize the chances of mistake-making, begin with basic survival needs. I know that sounds obvious. And yet, the number of times I have heard an educator admit to not sleeping, eating, or peeing is too high to count. Sometimes it can be difficult to even know what good self-care looks like when we are all operating in a state of emergency all the time. It can be helpful to reflect on foundational self-care to gage what we’re doing well and what we need to work on, both individually and within our school community.

One thing I realized as I embarked on the journey that began this book was that I rarely, if ever, thought too much about my best learning self. The one that is least likely to make harmful mistakes and the most likely to make the ideal mistakes. I wonder if you have thought about that before. If not, I am going to ask you to consider the self-care assessment for a few minutes. How did you do? Are there areas you were mildly aware could be a problem and now know could be adversely affecting your ability to teach well?

Imagine what you would be like if you did most or even all of the things on the list. Picture yourself in that well-cared-for state and how you would have dealt with one of the mistakes you find most regrettable. You might even want to take a few moments to write down two versions of the situation where the mistake was made, whether in a journal or on a scrap of paper. In the first, consider how it happened, including whatever level of selfcare and health you were working with at the time. Try to tease out the origin of the error. And if you can’t quite recall, use what you know about your typical pattern of behavior to suppose the most likely origin. Then, try rewriting the situation again, but this time, with a reimagined, well-cared-for you. How would you deal with that same scenario?

For example, I now have the habit of being metacognitive about my errors all the time (occupational hazard of writing a book about mistakes). But before that was a habit, I could look back at mistakes I made a decade ago and create a pretty reliable theory as to the likely origin of the error, in part because I know that most of the time in my day-to-day life I do not get enough sleep nor time to socialize. Even if I don’t recall exactly what happened that led to me bungling the presentation to the district coaches, it’s a pretty safe bet that one of those two things had something to do with it. If you take the time to reflect or journal about your errors, and in particular focusing on any possible role self-care might have played, you might find yourself feeling the way I did the first time I considered it. I was raised to self-sacrifice. There was nothing more noble to do. And yet, it is in that act of self-sacrifice that I must admit I am most likely to miss the greatest opportunities for growth as well as being most at risk for causing harm.


Mistakes are part of learning. Every educator knows this. But what happens before and after a mistake that facilitates that learning is rarely explored practically. In Risk. Fail. Rise. teachers will learn how  to address their own teaching mistakes, model with their own mistake-making, and improve their responses to others’ mistakes.